Singtel RE and WEKA Partner to Build Sovereign AI Infrastructure Across ASEAN

SINGAPORE, June 11, 2026 – As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates across Southeast Asia, Singtel Digital InfraCo’s sovereign AI cloud business RE has partnered with AI data infrastructure company WEKA to develop sovereign AI infrastructure solutions for Singapore and the broader ASEAN region.

The partnership, announced at SuperAI Singapore 2026, brings together Singtel’s sovereign AI cloud infrastructure, Paragon network orchestration platform and managed services with WEKA’s NeuralMesh platform, a high-performance software-defined storage system designed to keep GPUs continuously supplied with data.

The collaboration aims to support governments, enterprises and critical infrastructure sectors seeking secure, compliant and high-performance AI environments that meet data residency, regulatory and operational autonomy requirements.

The move comes as demand grows across ASEAN for trusted AI infrastructure capable of supporting advanced artificial intelligence workloads, including agentic AI, reasoning models, large-scale AI training, inference and real-time applications.

Sovereign AI Moves to the Centre of ASEAN’s Digital Strategy

Sovereign AI has become one of the most important themes in the next phase of digital infrastructure development as governments and enterprises look to retain control over data, models and AI operations within trusted jurisdictions.

For ASEAN economies, this is particularly significant as AI adoption expands into sensitive sectors such as government digital services, finance, healthcare, transport, utilities, public safety and critical infrastructure. Under the memorandum of understanding, RE and WEKA will offer a Sovereign AI Factory as a managed service for governments and enterprises across Singapore and ASEAN.

The service will support use cases such as national digital platforms, financial risk management, healthcare diagnostics, public safety systems, smart transport networks and utilities operations.

Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel Digital InfraCo, said sovereign AI adoption across ASEAN is creating demand for infrastructure that can combine compliance, security and performance at scale. “As sovereign AI adoption accelerates across ASEAN, governments and enterprises require infrastructure that is secure, compliant and built to perform at scale. Modern AI is no longer limited by compute power alone. The real bottleneck is how quickly data can reach GPUs, making high-speed data architecture just as critical as the GPUs themselves,” Chang said.

He added that the partnership with WEKA strengthens Singtel’s sovereign AI platform by combining trusted cloud infrastructure, advanced data capabilities and network intelligence.

Solving the Data Bottleneck in Enterprise AI

A key challenge for organisations deploying AI at scale is ensuring that GPUs are not left idle because data cannot be delivered fast enough. WEKA’s NeuralMesh platform is designed to remove storage bottlenecks and reduce idle GPU time, enabling organisations to improve infrastructure efficiency and accelerate AI workloads.

Singtel will integrate NeuralMesh as the high-performance data foundation for its GPU-as-a-Service offering, which is delivered through a Centre of Excellence for Applied AI in collaboration with a leading AI technology partner.

This will give governments and enterprises a platform to develop, deploy and scale production-grade AI applications more rapidly and securely. The infrastructure is also expected to support the rise of agentic AI systems, which require low latency, sustained throughput and access to large datasets for complex multi-step workflows.

Across industries, agentic and reasoning-based AI models are creating demand for platforms that can deliver microsecond latency and reliable access to data at scale, something traditional storage systems often struggle to provide.

Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO of WEKA, said sovereign AI in ASEAN is about more than data location. “Sovereign AI in the ASEAN region is not simply about where data is stored. It’s about developing future-ready infrastructure that can support exascale AI innovation across the entire ecosystem. Singtel brings unmatched geographical reach, network capabilities and operational trust to this partnership,” Zvibel said.

He added that the collaboration would provide a secure AI infrastructure foundation for ASEAN’s public and private sectors.

Three Models for Enterprise and Government AI Adoption

The Sovereign AI Factory will be offered through three flexible deployment models designed to meet varying requirements around sensitivity, regulation, cost and performance. The first is a Dedicated Sovereign Pod, which provides single-tenant environments for highly sensitive workloads. This is expected to appeal to governments, defence-related organisations, regulated financial institutions and critical infrastructure operators.

The second is a Regulated Multi-Tenant Sovereign Zone, offering isolated shared environments for regulated industries that require governance and compliance controls but may not need fully dedicated infrastructure. The third is a Hybrid Sovereign Model, which integrates on-premises systems with sovereign cloud capacity, allowing organisations to combine existing infrastructure with scalable AI cloud resources.

This flexible structure reflects the reality that AI adoption across ASEAN will not follow a single model. Large enterprises, government agencies, healthcare networks, banks, telcos and industrial operators will each require different levels of control, latency, compliance and integration.

Bringing Real-Time AI From Data Centres to the Edge

Singtel’s position as both a connectivity provider and cloud infrastructure player gives it a strategic role in extending AI from centralised sovereign data centres to edge locations. This could enable ultra-low-latency AI applications in areas such as traffic analytics, video intelligence, airport operations, port logistics, industrial automation and smart utilities.

For sectors where real-time decision-making is critical, edge-enabled sovereign AI could become an important foundation for digital transformation.

The partnership also reflects the growing convergence between AI infrastructure, telecommunications networks, cloud platforms and data centre ecosystems. As enterprises move from experimenting with AI to deploying production-grade applications, the need for integrated compute, storage, networking and governance capabilities is becoming more pronounced.

WEKA’s NeuralMesh platform is positioned as an AI data and memory infrastructure layer for training, inference and agentic workloads. The company says NeuralMesh can extend GPU memory capacity, accelerate time to first token and support more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint. For Singtel, the collaboration strengthens its regional AI infrastructure strategy at a time when Singapore is seeking to position itself as a trusted AI and digital infrastructure hub for Southeast Asia.

The announcement also reinforces a broader theme emerging from SuperAI Singapore 2026: the next phase of AI competition will not be defined by models alone, but by the infrastructure required to deploy AI securely, efficiently and at scale.

As ASEAN governments and enterprises accelerate AI adoption, sovereign AI platforms could become a core part of the region’s digital resilience, regulatory compliance and economic competitiveness strategies.